


Regen

by lollki



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Morning Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post VJ-Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29473575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollki/pseuds/lollki
Summary: One takes watch while the other sleeps. This principle is now as fundamentally a part of him as his heart.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 7
Kudos: 17





	Regen

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy :))

In the early Okinawan morning, with the sun just peering over the edge of the junglescape, a pair of boots, hung by the straps from a tent pole, sway with the wind. It’s a jade-washed, watery pocket in time, rainy, and it’s the kind that Eugene loves because of how much softer it makes his bed seem.  _ To the simple comforts _ , he thinks, the kinds that only become apparent once you’ve been an indefinite part of the mud for so long that the epidermis between oneself and it blurs. The two versions of himself are stood side by side: him just a week prior, sporting a second skin of bloodsweatgrime and him now, scrubbed down to the pink fresh-facedness of a newborn, in a clean shirt, unassumingly watching Snafu sleep as he’s turned with his back toward Eugene, with his chest rising-falling softly and his mouth deceitfully quiet where it’s usually open with no shortage of commentary.

During the first week after VJ-day Snafu was sleeping sound, long hours and in the meantime Eugene took to haunting the outside of their tent, perched there like a gargoyle in the glow of the fireplace they’d set up outside of it every evening to play cards and drink swish around. One takes watch while the other sleeps. This principle is now as fundamentally a part of him as his heart. Becoming a piece of organic chainlink in the whole damn war-machine teaches you a few things, one of which is that its eyes never close all at the same time. When Snafu rests his, Eugene’s replace them, simple as that.

But apart from this practicality there’s something else that Eugene finds himself motivated by; the presence of a certain sweetness, a warmth underneath his watchfulness. Hard to place at first because in combat, everything becomes everything else - dead, alive, asleep, awake, hate, love - but once he had time to ruminate before falling asleep, he could name it “affection”. 

Eugene thinks it’s a kind of innate reaction - Once you’ve gunned down enough enemies to fill a small village with, the human part at your very core starts screaming for water and nurture like a weed growing from a crack in the concrete which is why he had to gut all the good in himself and make sure Snafu received it, if only to maintain homeostasis.

The protectiveness makes him a man he likes and while Snafu was the one who found it in him, who harnessed it like a nugget of gold in a sieve full of pebbles Eugene was the one who held him in place one night he was just about to crack just as he’s the one keeping watch now.

As he glances over, broken out of his reverie by a wounded little sound, he finds Snafu safely in his cot, now turned to face him. Soft brushstroke-hair falls into his face. Eugene diverts his attention back to the book in his lap. He licks his thumb, turns the page and then halts anew, as he sees him stir again from the corner of his eye. He turns to watch the lowlight silhouette grow against the beige of the tarp, semi-translucent like tulle or silk and glowing green in the early morning behind that. Foliage, fresh and damp from the rain. Eugene swears he could pick out every single drop of it.   
  


“Gene?”

A soft, sleep-rough voice travels over the pitter-patter of the rain. Snafu, upright in his cot, rubbing his knuckle to his eye, his skinny torso melding into the scratchy, felt-like blanket.

“Yeah?”

“You awake?”

Eugene pauses awkwardly.

“Yeah.”

The cot on the other end of the tent gives a rusty, metallic squeak, and an even louder one when Snafu sits up on it before he moves to slip under Eugene’s blanket. He hardly has time to dog-ear his page and drop the book to the floor before Snafu replaces it in his lap

“Hey, ouch!”

“Sshh!”

Snafu adjusts his body to slot it against Eugene’s, finger to his mouth.

“People could hear us.” Snafu tells him with the one mischievous telltale dimple that dents up when he half-smirks. His hair has grown out, Eugene notices, and goes to touch the pad of his thumb to Snafu’s forehead.   
“Your hair looks good like that.” Eugene muses and feels Snafu shift on top of him, just a little more matched into the shape of Eugene. Snafu kisses him briefly, softly, then pulls back to look at him.

“Wanna do it?”

Eugene snorts. Snafu is beautiful, radiant but he’s no gentleman. Not that it doesn’t charm Eugene like toxin sedates prey.

“You’re way too direct, Shelton.”

In lieu of an answer, Snafu sits up, the blanket travelling down his spine: knob by delicate knob before it comes to pool around his waist. The cheap cotton of the corps-issued t-shirts stretches over his shoulders but sits loose across his stomach. It’s hung into a soft U that almost looks like marble.

“So is that a yes or a no?”

“Neither.” Eugene’s hand finds Snafu’s fatigue-clad hip. The fabric gives way easily when he pulls just lightly enough to expose the hill of his hip bone. White, tan, green, from shirt to skin to the hem of his pants. The other hand follows. 

It’s hard to tear away his eyes from the crux of his thighs, where he splits in two, from the taut stomach or the way his shoulders bend back to two mere dips at his collarbone.

“...but yes.”

Snafu guffaws, victorious. He pulls the shirt over his head and Eugene immediately grabs his waist. The hunger flares up in an instant. Snafu’s airy laugh melts into a heavy groan, heavy, heavy heat. Eugene is very aware that there’s men asleep just seven feet over in the next tent and that if anyone were to walk by, the thin tarp wouldn’t do much in terms of hiding them. But then he looks at Snafu, who braces one hand to Eugene’s sternum and walks the other to his dick and his focus becomes the point of a needle. A tunnel at the end of which sits Snafu and the way he rubs himself over Eugene’s growing erection like a cat in heat.

“God I wish I could be loud, though.” he whispers and when he rolls his hips, his mouth falls open on a quiet moan and a  _ fuck _ , head thrown back so all Eugene sees is the V of his jaw.

Eugene wraps his arms around Snafu’s middle, so tight that he scoots the last few inches down in his lap and comes to rest just right, with the stiff length of him right against Eugene’s. One experimental roll of his hips has Snafu keening - he falls forehead-first against Eugene’s shoulder.

“Good?”

“ _ Yeah _ .” Snafu whisper-moans. Eugene wonders what he’d been thinking about before he invaded Eugene’s bed with how quickly and feverishly turned on he is.

“Get these off.” Snafu commands, hands brought down to the fly of Eugene’s fatigues. Eugene swats his hand away before grabbing his hip and grinds up into him instead, making Snafu’s head roll back. Again and again and again, until he’s panting and dizzy with anticipation - it’s almost Eugene’s favorite part to see him lax like that. Malleable, like Eugene could just pick him up and bend him into shape.

Not that he doesn’t enjoy that elusive machismo Snafu slips off and on like a mask, when he grunts obscenities into his ear just to hear the cant of dominance on himself, but Snafu melting into something so submissive and vaguely feminine makes Eugene feel a different kind of powerful. 

He digs his hands into Snafu’s thighs, pulls the crux of them against his abdomen and then, with one swift movement, tips him backwards onto the cot so Eugene is stooped over him with his legs around his waist. Snafu laughs, his eyes crinkling sweetly and he bends his head to the side like he’s trying to look coquettish or demure.

“Hot.” he says, teasingly and Eugene smiles back at him, then leans down to nip at his throat, just briefly.   
“You don’t know the half of it.” Eugene mouths against the skin between neck and ear and revels in the shiver he receives in response. When he detaches, Snafu looks every bit as debauched as Eugene expects him to; the raspberry smudge of his mouth hanging open, the long column of his throat bobbing as he swallows. He doesn’t break eye-contact when he wanders his hands down to the fly of Snafu’s fatigues and doesn’t, when he pulls them off. Snafu is just as stubborn, something excitedly defiant in those glossy greens when he wiggles out of his pants. It’s hard not to start laughing - the whole scenario is a tight-rope walk between easy laughter and red-hot urgency. Eugene thinks he might choke on the love that’s swelling up his throat but there’s a different time to put words to it so instead he cups Snafu’s hip and kisses him until his lips feel bruised.   
  
Snafu’s had enough of it fairly quickly and hints at it, when he starts clumsily grabbing at Eugene’s pants. Eugene concedes and before he knows it, Snafu pulls him in by the hip and aligns himself with Eugene’s lubed-up dick and then, before he realizes it, Eugene’s inside of him and it feels like all the air’s been knocked out of his lungs. Judging from the pleasure-pained expression on Snafu’s face he feels the same way and he chokes back a whine but only half-succeeds at it. Eugene fucking loves when he gets Snafu’s voice into that high a register. The way he could close his eyes and have flat-chested, stubble-jawed Snafu sigh like a girl at the way Eugene fucks him.   
  
Broken-off, choked-out bites of sound permeate the tent, a raspy, toothy little something on Snafu’s side against the heavy rain. He lets himself be handled whichever way Eugene pleases and that alone makes him feel like he’s bursting at the seams. He’s not always like this so when he is, Eugene feels his physiology distinctly conditioned to react to every over-heated brush of skin-to-skin. He’s overcome with the tug of two opposing forces; to please to the point his lover dissolves into a mere shiver of himself and, on the other end, to greedily take, take, take until he’s had his fill of that hot-mouthed, hot-headed creature.

Eugene feels distinctly animal when he grabs Snafu by the jaw and thrusts, shallow and fast all the while meeting his eye. Like a kaleidoscope, he sees expression morphing into expression, sees himself mirrored in Snafu's reactions not milliseconds after - closed mouth falling open, a locked airway bursting open with a quiet moan, the furrowing of his brow suddenly relaxing when his head falls back in that way of his that lets Eugene know it's particularly good like that. He hears it in the "Please" Snafu mouths soon thereafter. Eugene thinks he could get off on that sound alone.  
  
All clouded by endorphins, where the tight heat around his cock becomes emotionally indistinguishable from the impish, over-the-shoulder smile he remembers falling in love to, Eugene wants to speak his love into existence. He has the words all lined up, just as he’s as deep in him as he can go, as close to Snafu as he can be, but holds back for propriety's sake. Instead, he buries his nose into the crook of his shoulder, mouthing at his neck when he closes his palm around Snafu’s dick and makes him come with a silent cry, no voice, just rough, hot air.

“Fuck.” Eugene hears and the spine below him distorts into a tense arch before the invisible string between Snafu’s neck and the small of his back breaks and he falls lax onto the cot.   


Eugene can't help but follow him.  
  
Much like a sudden silence after a bout of laughter, this break from the creaking springs, from the pinhole focus narrowing Eugene’s perception down to a pearl of sweat on Snafu’s tawny collarbone, to the subtle ripple his carotid causes in his neck as he bends it to the side, to the jut of his upper lip, to the pained knot in his brow, it feels like all the rest of the world washing back over them. Reappeared has the thrum of the rain and the scent of fertile, rich soil and the luminous green filtering through the thin tarp as Snafu lies below him, breathing as if he’d just sprinted, eyes come to a blissful, angelic close.

Eugene watches him until Snafu opens his eyes and it has that same breathless quality that the first thrust had. When Snafu gives him a look, he can't help but split into a grin. It's amusing to for once know something Snafu doesn't, even if it's just the way Eugene feels about him. Until he chooses to divulge it, that love is completely his own and there's something about it that feels inarguably moral and good.   
  
Uncharacteristically, Snafu then smiles at him. And it's not a smirk either, it's a genuine smile and Eugene is unsure if he's ever seen that on him, that specific shade of happiness - the peaceful, calm kind. _Eudamonia_. Eugene braces his weight onto his elbows and brings himself face-to-face, then kisses him on the mouth. 

His love threatens to spill over into every little gesture, this one as much as handing him a tube of toothpaste.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> leave a keysmash if you like <3


End file.
